Three articles published by the same author in the Revue des Questions Scientifiques in 2005 and 2006 are reexamined with special attention paid to a theorem published by Allahverdyan and Nieuwenhuizen in 2002 concerning Thomson’s formulation of the second law, as well as to the results of the so-called “before-before ” experiment performed on entangled pairs by Stefanov, Zbinden, Gisin and Suarez. As far as thermodynamics are concerned, it is explained here that a macroscopic observer can generate quasi “cycles”, whose cyclical characteristics are in fact only valid from the macroscopic point of view, that can potentially enable her/him to retrieve work from a thermalizer without causing any perpetual motion. Concerning quantum entanglement, it is recognized – in contrast with what the author originally published in 2005 and 2006- that superluminal transmission of decipherable information cannot be achieved if the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory remains universally valid. It is also pointed out that the foundations of general relativity cannot be easily reconciled with the implications of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen measurements.
Three articles published by the same author in the Revue des Questions Scientifiques in 2005 and 2006 are reexamined with special attention paid to a theorem published by Allahverdyan and Nieuwenhuizen in 2002 concerning Thomson’s formulation of the second law, as well as to the results of the so-called “before-before ” experiment performed on entangled pairs by Stefanov, Zbinden, Gisin and Suarez. As far as thermodynamics are concerned, it is explained here that a macroscopic observer can generate quasi “cycles”, whose cyclical characteristics are in fact only valid from the macroscopic point of view, that can potentially enable her/him to retrieve work from a thermalizer without causing any perpetual motion. Concerning quantum entanglement, it is recognized – in contrast with what the author originally published in 2005 and 2006- that superluminal transmission of decipherable information cannot be achieved if the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory remains universally valid. It is also pointed out that the foundations of general relativity cannot be easily reconciled with the implications of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen measurements.
The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox was enunciated in 1935 and since then it has made a lot of ink flow. Being a subtle result, it has also been largely misunderstood. Indeed, if questioned about its solution, many physicists will still affirm today that the paradox has been solved by the Bell-test experimental results, which have shown that entangled states are real. However, this remains a wrong view, as the validity of the EPR ex-absurdum reasoning is independent from the Bell-test experiments, and the possible structural shortcomings it evidenced cannot be eliminated. These were correctly identified by the Belgian physicist Diederik Aerts, in the eighties of last century, and are about the inability of the quantum formalism to describe separate physical systems. The purpose of the present article is to bring Aerts' overlooked result to the attention again of the physics' community, explaining its content and implications.
Recently Allahverdyan and Nieuwenhuizen (cond-mat/0006404) argued that the second law of thermodynamics may be violated in a quantum system as a "consequence of quantum coherence in the presence of the slightly off-equilibrium nature of the bath." By using a standard result about relative entropy, we prove rigorously that the second law is never violated (and, in particular, a perpetual motion of the second kind can never be realized) in quantum systems no matter how strong ``quantum coherence'' is or no matter how far one goes from equilibrium.
This review is related to the Einstein-Bohr debate and to Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen’s (EPR) and Bohm’s (EPRB) Gedanken-experiments as well as their realization in actual experiments. I examine a significant number of papers, from my minority point of view and conclude that the well-known theorems of Bell and Clauser, Horne, Shimony and Holt (CHSH) deal with mathematical abstractions that have only a tenuous relation to quantum theory and the actual EPRB experiments. It is also shown that, therefore, Bell-CHSH cannot be used to assess the nature of quantum entanglement, nor can physical features of entanglement be used to prove Bell-CHSH. Their proofs are, among other factors, based on a statistical sampling argument that is invalid for general physical entities and processes and only applicable for finite “populations”; not for elements of physical reality that are linked, for example, to a time-like continuum. Bell-CHSH have, furthermore, neglected the subtleties of the theorem of Vorob’ev that includes their theorems as special cases. Vorob’ev found that certain combinatorial-topological cyclicities of classical random variables form a necessary and sufficient condition for the constraints that are now known as Bell-CHSH inequalities. These constraints, however, must not be linked to the observables of quantum theory nor to the actual EPRB experiments for a variety of reasons, including the existence of continuum-related variables and appropriate considerations of symmetry.
On 25 March 1935, the Physical Review received a paper from Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, with the title “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” A few days later, on 30 March 1935, I was born. My life with Einstein was off to a promising start. Some would call it an inauspicious start. Abraham Pais, for example, says in his otherwise admirable biography of Einstein [1] that “the only part of this article that will ultimately survive, I believe, is this last phrase [ No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this ], which so poignantly summarizes Einstein's views on quantum mechanics in his later years.” But today, in this centenary of the Einstein annus mirabilis, as the EPR paper and I both turn 70, it is, in fact, the most cited of all Einstein's papers [2]. The debate over its conceptual implications rages hotter than ever, and for the first time, practical (well, for the moment still gedanken practical) applications of the EPR effect have emerged in cryptography and in other areas of quantum information processing. Being only five weeks old, I was unprepared to pay attention to the article that appeared in the New York Times on 4 May 1935 under an elaborate set of headlines and subheads: And I was completely oblivious to the stern rebuke from Einstein himself, published three days later in the Times , which declared that “any information upon which the article … is based was given to you without my authority. It is my invariable practice to discuss scientific matters only in the appropriate forum and I deprecate advance publication of any announcement in regard to such matters in the secular press.” Apparently Podolsky had tipped off the Times to the article, which did not appear in the sacred press until the 15 May issue of Physical Review. It is not clear that Einstein ever forgave him, and I wish I had been old enough to send Podolsky a cross letter myself. Anyone growing up in America in the 1940s knew that the preeminent genius of our age, and perhaps of any other, lived in Princeton, New Jersey, had a predilection for baggy sweaters, and was always badly in need of a haircut—as far ahead of his time in dress and grooming as he was ahead in science during his 1905 annus mirabilis.
Roman Schnabel's article argues that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox can be resolved by identifying a flaw in what the author calls the "EPR implication" and by using radioactive alpha decay as an example showing that predictability does not exclude genuine randomness. The paper is clearly written and addresses an important foundational question. In our view, however, its main conclusion does not follow. The article narrows the original EPR argument, attributes too much to Bell-inequality violations, and replaces the central EPR structure - which involves incompatible observables and locality-based reasoning - with a simpler case of correlated random events. The result is an interesting interpretive remark, but not, we think, a satisfactory scientific resolution of the EPR problem.